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Funding Feminism in Tech  

My Top 5 Favorite Feminist Organizations and Projects, And Why You Should Give Them Money 

5 min readOct 23, 2013

In looking at the aggregate lifecycle of women in tech, we see a constant pattern of attrition at every stage, and at every critical formative moment. Fewer girls report an interest in STEM at early ages. Only 18% of undergraduate computer and information sciences degrees are earned by women. And women who do join the industry leave the sector at over twice the rate of men. Similar patterns can be seen across other marginalized groups. Methods of intervention in the systems that lead to this attrition must occur at every stage — from children’s programs aimed at nurturing early education and interest in STEM fields to community-building and retention efforts for marginalized persons already working in the field.

There are many ways to support such programs, from helping to organize them, to staffing them, to promoting and bringing awareness to them. In addition to (often free or low-cost) labor, these programs rely on financial support from the community, and don’t typically receive even a fraction of the corporate sponsorship poured into mainstream tech conferences, incubator programs and hackathons that reinforce the status quo while offering no meaningful evolution of the culture. In contrast, feminist tech programs change the public discourse for good, are instrumental in recruiting and retaining more diverse talent, and provide sustainable models of innovation and organization — sustainable because they bring more diverse workers into the industry, provide them with the skills and community to succeed long-term, and increase the overall level of critical consciousness in the community.

Individuals already working in tech have a profound opportunity to contribute financially to these efforts. Even women working in tech — who are underpaid, under-promoted and accumulate less overall wealth from salary and non-salary compensation compared to men — may have a great deal of financial privilege compared to other groups.

Especially for the growing group of male allies within the technology community, feminist organizations represent an opportunity to use their financial privilege towards improving the lives and experiences of marginalized peoples.

(For more on using your privilege to positively impact the industry, please read my post on Managing Against the Machine).

Here are some of my favorite organizations — with a Silicon Valley slant — promoting feminism and supporting women and marginalized groups in tech. If you are financially able, I hope you will consider donating some amount, no matter how small, to these individuals and groups.

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The Ada Developer’s Academy

has only a few days of fundraising left. Ada Developer’s Academy is an intensive, 12-month program for women transitioning into software careers focusing on the Ruby on Rails tech stack. Not only free to its students, it will provide a living stipend to them. That is fucking awesome. Donate to their Indiegogo campaign here.

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Black Girls Code

provides young and pre-teen girls with opportunities to learn tech and computer programming skills. Their programs include Summer of Code, with classes in mobile app development, computer game design and more; plus their signature “Build a Webpage in a Day” for girls 7-17. IT IS AWESOME. You should support this right now.

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Double Union

is a newly-opened feminist hackerspace and community in San Francisco. It is led by an awesome group of women and having had the opportunity to attend a few of their events already, I am incredibly inspired by their work. Being in creative working spaces for women is a transformative experience that I hope more women in our community can have more regularly thru hackerspaces like Double Union. Donate here.

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Ashe Dryden

When I get asked which feminist organizations I support, I always say Ashe Dryden. Yes, she is (or so we are led to believe), just one person, but her tireless efforts to educate our community about diversity through writing, speaking, company intervention, travel and advocacy are truly inspiring. She has a bunch of projects in the works to continue to scale this work through writing books, making a video series, and creating a diversity resources site. Help her help us.

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Feminists and Activists on GitTip

I just signed up for GitTip. It’s an interesting concept: a way to give weekly gifts to people that inspire you. Designed to be more sustainable that platforms that give one-time payments, I’m interested in this as a way to help fund and reward the typically unpaid activism done by feminists in technology. So, click around and consider using it to help support individuals! Like Julie Pagano, who helps organize Girl Develop IT Pittsburgh, raises awareness around impostor syndrome, and has spent a lot of time educating the community recently on assault in the tech industry; or Skud, founder of the Geek Feminism blog and wiki.

These are only a few feminist organizations, projects and people working hard to make things better and needing community support. Please share other thoughts on Twitter and I’ll try to spread the word there too.

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Shanley
Shanley

Written by Shanley

distributed systems, startups, semiotics, writing, culture, management

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